While many companies will often look at the direct costs associated with a technology upgrade (hardware, software, telecommunications), they rarely take into account the “soft” costs associated with training their employees on a new system. Even more important, companies are just starting to realize the real benefits and increased revenue from training their employees on a new system. However, what about making an investment in training your employees to more efficiently use your existing systems?

A new study conducted by researchers at MIT and Boston University (both in my fair city), analyzed how IT makes people more productive. (Keep in mind the study was funded by major technology companies Cisco and Intel, among others. However, it has been recognized by the International Conference on Information Systems as the best paper of late.)

The study comprised 125,000 email messages, five years of project data and survey responses from a cross section of respondents. You can read a decent ComputerWorld interview with Co-Author Marshall Van Alstyne here and abstracts from the study here and here. While it is most certainly a good idea to train your employees on any new systems you have, think about doing so for your current systems as well. Alstyne summarizes:

“Invest in IT skills. High IT skill levels reduce the perception of information overload and facilitate multitasking, which is directly associated with increases in revenue. But don’t necessarily expect high IT users to be faster in project completions. The real impact is that they’re doing so much more. It’s total projects completed, not time per project.”

Although there is a tipping point where productivity starts to decrease due to too much multitasking, I couldn’t have said it better than Alstyne does here. How many of your users really know how to effectively multitask with your existing systems? Start with training them on the current systems a bit more and see what results they produce… I’m curious to hear about the results.